The Song Behind Today’s Review Title
At 12:01 AM on August 1, 1981 MTV burst onto cable TV screens across America for the first time, and the very first music video played on the channel was from a group called The Buggles featuring the song Video Killed the Radio Star. It’s a bubbly, danceable tune expressing lament about the changing technologies of the twentieth century, focused on the midcentury change from radio dramas to television.
Now, a new technology is on the rise and creating angst and excitement in equal measure. AI is both hailed for what it can do and reviled for what the companies behind AI have done and are doing. Many felt that companies like OpenAI trained their AI models on stolen human creative capital. Despite lawsuits, some successful, some not, many are still furious about the rise of AI, trained on the work of artists and creatives who weren’t consulted. The fuller rendering of today’s review title foreshadowed that kind of emotion. From the first verse of Radio Star, the full line says, “They took the credit for your second symphony, rewritten by machine on new technology, and now I understand the problems you could see.”
In it’s own bit of foreshadowing MTV chose for it’s debut a song that lamented the changing of one old technology for another. The success of MTV completely upended the centrality of radio in introducing new music to American audiences. Its influence through music videos dominated pop music throughout the 1980s, before it lost it’s own new music centrality to the rise of YouTube and streaming services. One technology replacing another…
You can see the music video that kicked off MTV’s musical reign here on YouTube.
When you hear the term Artificial Intelligence, or AI you likely think about companies like OpenAI (the makers of ChatGPT) and Anthropic (the makers of Claude), or maybe Microsoft and it’s Copilot AI (which is based on ChatGPT). These companies products are mostly a type of AI called Large Language Models or LLMs. LLMs are trained on large amounts of text data, and they rely on predictive models to operate. Basically, they take in queries from users (which is simply more text) and, using their predictive models, they determine relevant words or phrases to string together to provide a response.
No Adult Left Behind starts out as a guide for folks who have yet to really dig in and experiment with these LLMs. The author shares his own experience and offers his tips and guidance so that the reader can learn how to get the most use out of these tools. This guidance is useful and easy to follow. It encourages you not to take the first response an LLM offers as sufficient, but to “engage in a conversation” - that is, continue to query so that you get a better, fuller response. He even suggests turning to more than one LLM with the same query to see what it will respond with, as two different AIs are likely trained on different sets of data, or might have predictive models that guide responses in different ways.
Author George Pillari
Later in the book Pillari turns his attention to other kinds of artificial intelligence, digging most deeply into advanced control systems. These systems include autopilots on airplanes, which respond to inputs from instruments onboard, and from the pilot, to take over the flying of large commercial jets. They also include driver assistance systems being offered on more and more cars, which can take control of your car, with observation and guidance from you the driver.
There are plenty of other examples of this type of system, including those which can control drones (unmanned vehicles) - in the air, at sea, and on the ground, and which are being relied on more in warfare, particularly by the Ukrainians in their struggle with Russia. Some Ukrainian drones are now rumored to be carrying AI modules onboard so that they can operate autonomously and not have communications with human pilots “jammed” by the Russians.
This part of the book is more of an exercise in helping the reader to understand what artificial intelligence is, how different AI systems interact with people, and what their strengths and limitations are. He also tackles the question of what happens to people when their reliance on these AI systems becomes too great.
If you’ve never used an AI tool but are curious to learn how, this book can be an excellent resource to help you get started, and I can and do recommend it for that.
RATING: Three Stars ⭐⭐⭐
OVERALL COMMENTS: If you’ve never used an AI tool but are curious to learn how, this book can be an excellent resource to help you get started, and I can and do recommend it for that.
WHERE I GOT MY COPY: I received an advance reviewer’s copy of the ebook through BookSirens, and courtesy of the author. The book was released on May 25th and is available on Amazon.
Title: No Adult Left Behind
Author: George Pillari
Publisher: Self Published (Running Fox Partners) available on Kindle
Publish Date: May 15, 2026
ISBN-13: 9798195157883
Publisher’s List Price: $9.49 paperback, $2.99 kindle ebook
OTHER THINGS TO KNOW AND CONSIDER ABOUT AI
AI tools don’t exist in a vacuum, and there are some things about where we are as a society with AI today that this book doesn’t cover, and that may be useful to be aware of as you dive into AI (LLM) tools.
AI is an umbrella term for more than one concept and multiple kinds of tools and systems. The term AI is being hyped an awful lot right now by both the media and the companies behind new AI tools, particularly the LLM companies, as the latter strive to get more customers and more revenue to bring their products out from being funded by venture capitalists to actually making profits. This “hype cycle” is also creating concerns around AI.
One concern is around whether or not AI companies are driving another bubble in our stock market to the detriment of our economy. Another is the frequent controversies around construction of AI data centers, and their impacts on electricity costs and water usage for the residents of the communities in which they locate. And a third is the growing concern around “license plate camera” surveillance and how the expanding network of such cameras could be put to use by AI tools to track unsuspecting citizens, prompting civil rights concerns.
If you’re curious about any of those things I can recommend the newsletters and podcasts of 404 Media. They cover these and other aspects of AI and modern technology.
If you want to take a deep dive into the economic bubble concerns from someone with a very cynical view of AI as an industry check out Ed Zitron’s newsletter at https://www.wheresyoured.at/.
And for an up to the minute report on the financial concerns around the latest AI tool - agents - check out this Substack from the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson.
Other Books and Stuff
CURRENT BOOKS & STUFF
I’ve made enough progress on The American Revolution and the Fate of the World by Richard Bell that I’m hoping (fingers crossed) to complete it in the next week.
In other media consumption, we’ve completed season 1 of Jack Ryan on Amazon Prime (no Prime membership required), and are halfway through season 2.
We watched a few episodes of Black Monday, a dark comedy series from Showtime that’s available on Netflix, and while it is funny it hasn’t really held our interest so it’s likely going to be a DNF for us.
We did see the new previews for season 3 of House of the Dragon on HBO and are eagerly awaiting the first episode on June 21.
WHAT’S NEXT
Next week I’ll be reviewing Tyrants and Rogues by Robert G. Parkinson. It’s about the Declaration of Independence and what it meant to the leaders of the Revolution. Here’s a bit of the publisher’s summary:
Parkinson takes us into the grievances, giving us stories of the Revolutionary era that are little known today but loomed large for the patriots. As the leaders of the Revolution saw it, they had been pushed to the breaking point by British officials who undermined colonial legislatures and courts, corrupted the judiciary, turned military power against civilians, inflamed slave revolts, forced colonists to fight one another—ultimately, waging war on their own people.
In his brilliantly original reading of the Declaration, Parkinson asks fundamental questions that have too often been overlooked: Why did the colonies declare independence when they did? What were their nonnegotiable demands? Who were the individuals whose actions made reconciliation impossible? By recovering the people and conflicts behind the Declaration’s grievances, Parkinson offers a strikingly new account of the American Revolution—and shows that the issues that most alarmed colonists in 1776 are urgent once again today.
